Religion and Politics

I am not exactly going to do that: not because I think the writer's age and accomplishments place him above
cudgeling — I don't
think that, and if WFB thought I did think it, he'd never speak to me again — but because the
actual pros and cons of creationism
vs. science can be found argued, in far greater detail than a 2,000-word column could contain, all over the
web. I generally refer
argumentative
emailers to the TalkOrigins website, which is a
handy clearing-house for this
sort of thing, with links to many other sites. (Including
347 creationist ones!
If your favorite creationist website isn't included in the list, the TalkOrigins people make it easy for you to add it.
This, by the way, offers an
instructive contrast to creationist websites, which rarely link to anti-creationist ones. TalkOrigins links to the
Center for Science and Culture, but CSC does not return the favor.)

What I am going to do is to take a glance at the psychology here: not "What is true and what
isn't?" — a point
on which our minds are all rigidly made up anyway — so much as "Who believes what, and why?"

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WFB's piece illustrates rather clearly two things that lurk in the interstices of a great many of the
creation-evolution arguments. Both those
things, I am going to claim, are core features of human nature, present to some degree — though greater or
lesser in individual cases, of
course — in all but a pathological few of us. Those things are:

The need to spot intelligent agency at work in the world outside our own precious selves, and

The need to be constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our status in the various groups we belong to, and
ditto with the statuses of
other group members.

Both these core features of the individual human organism give rise to large-scale social phenomena: the first
to religion, and the second to
politics. (Two of the three topics, I note in passing, that you are traditionally forbidden to talk about in a British
army or navy officers' mess.)
Over to WFB:

Fifteen minutes after Charles Darwin explained his theory of evolution, his disciples —
apostles — ruled
out any heresy on the subject of the naturalistic explanation for human life.

That one 27-word sentence contains three religious terms: "disciples," "apostles,"
"heresy," and two political
ones: "ruled out," "heresy." (Politics is about power. You can "rule out" something
only if you have the power to
do so. The word "heresy" is in both lists because its connotations are both religious —
"You believe the wrong
things!" — and political — "We have the power to punish you for believing
those things!" Just how
Darwin's "disciples" managed to acquire so much power in just fifteen minutes, WFB does not tell us.)

Here you see the natural disposition of the normal human mind. We have a mighty need to believe that all ideas
about the non-human world are
at root religious ideas, ideas centrally concerned with human-like agency or its absence, promulgated by charismatic
teachers and their followers;
and we have just as mighty a need to assign social events, including public reactions to new scientific theories, to
plays of status and power.

Why? Because the first, last, and only great truth about human beings is that we are social animals. To function
as such, we need two
particular abilities.

First, we need the ability to calculate what other people are likely to do, based on our assumption (our
"theory of mind" or "ToM," in the current
cognitive-science
terminology) that their beliefs, desires and intentions
("BDIs" —
more cog-sci jargon) are much like our own. We could not function as social animals without this ability to impute
agency to the humans
around us. And to impute it elsewhere, too: Survival prospects in the wild are much improved if we can impute some kind
of agency to higher animals.
That this ability slops over into imputing agency to the sky (weather), the earth's crust (earthquakes), and so on, is
not very surprising. In
extremely complex systems like human mentation, boundaries are rarely inviolable.

Second, we need the ability to compare ourselves with others, assess hierarchies, know whose orders can be
safely ignored and whose had
better be obeyed, with whom it would be reasonable to compete and with whom dire folly to do so … and so
on.

The human inclinations to religion and politics follow very naturally.

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Both these abilities are smeared across a broad spectrum, like other human abilities — like the
ability to sing a song or catch a
thrown ball.

In the case of the ability to impute agency, at the null end of the spectrum we have autism, in which a
person seems to lack a ToM
altogether. Towards the other end we have the Pathetic Fallacy and,
standing on a ledge off
from the very furthest point of this end, we find extreme paranoid schizophrenia, when you believe that your own desk
fan is out to get you.

In the case of status and power computation, the spectrum goes from the politically clueless person, who
never knows who's up and who's
down, to the gossip columnist and the political consultant, who always know those things to within a tenth of a
millimeter.

As best I can judge, WFB is pretty much at dead center normality on the first of these spectrums, somewhat
towards the high end on the
second.

I'd rate myself low on both spectrums. I don't doubt that other human beings have minds containing BDIs, but I
am not much good at guessing
how they will behave — my ToM is rather feeble — and so I am socially maladroit. Further, my
agency-imputing module has zero
spillover. I am pretty sure my dog possesses BDIs that are at least crudely analogous to human ones, but I draw the
line right about
there — at any rate, well short of meteorological or seismic events. I don't believe there is any human-like
agency at work in
thunderstorms, or earthquakes, or phylogeny. Practically everybody at practically all points in human history has
thought differently: hence
Thor, Poseidon, and
the Discovery Institute.

On the political spectrum I am well-nigh hopeless. Even after many years in the corporate world, office politics
always caught me
napping — I was for ever being stunned to hear that Smith had got fired or Jones made a Director, and even
my own firings and promotions
came as bolts from the blue.

In any case, I stress that both of these abilities are very human, almost universally so. Far, far more people
are religious than are
irreligious; far, far more people read People magazine than the Bulletin of the American Mathematical
Society. We are an
agency-imputing, status-computing species. WE HARDLY DO ANYTHING ELSE!

Out there on the eccentric fringes, though, some of us do do other things. One of the other things we
do is science.

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Science is an odd sort of pursuit, way off the beaten track of human intellection. That, at any rate, is the
conclusion suggested by the
historical evidence. Homo sap. has been around for 100,000 years or so, yet it's only in the last 400-odd of
those years — less
than half of a percent — that methodical scientific inquiry has been undertaken. There were theologians and
politicians long, long, long
before there were scientists. In dark moments I am inclined to think the former will still be with us long after the
latter have been eliminated,
probably via mass lynching. To put it very
crudely — and yes, I am aware
of all the quibbles here — science is an unnatural activity, an un-human activity. You see
the common awareness of this
in fictional representations of scientists — the
one on the Muppet showhad no eyes.

Scientists themselves tend to forget this because they associate mainly with other scientists. If you have red
hair, and hang around all day
with other red-haired people, then you'll slip into thinking that erythrism is the normal state of affairs, that
blondes and brunettes are not quite
right … on the head. The unnaturalness of science is more clear to folk like me, scientifically inclined
but not scientifically employed,
than it is to actual scientists.

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about science, as a human activity, is that so far as its content is
concerned (I'll deal with its
practice in just a moment), science deliberately turns its back on those two great human drives I am talking
about. It rules out, a
priori — but for excellent reasons, not arbitrarily — human-like agency as an explanation
for any natural phenomenon at
all. And it assigns status to scientists based not on how many enemies they've slain (games they've won, deals they've
clinched), or how many cattle
(dollars, houses) they've accumulated, or how many slaves they own (employees work for them), or how many wives they've
got (or had), but on how
original their ideas about the world are, and how well further observation confirms the value of those ideas.

In their extramural activities, to be sure, scientists can be as human as the rest of us.
Some are religious; and even those who aren't are
liable to tell you across the
dinner table, from sheer mental/verbal habit, that sunspot activity threatens radio communication, or that
quarksprefer to associate in twos and threes.

As for politics — well, if you think that jostling for power and status stop dead at the door of the
physics lab, you are very
seriously mistaken. Ask a physicist. However, while the result of those jostlings might get some particular physicist a
rung up on the tenure ladder,
or a much-coveted NIH grant, his eventual status as a scientist will be determined by the quality of his work,
and by nothing else at all.
There are plenty of second- and third-raters with high positions in the administration or teaching of science: there
are none esteemed by posterity
as Great Scientists.

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Along with in-group status-jostling, human beings are also prone to negative feelings and attitudes towards
out-group folk. You can argue
about how essentially and ineradicably human that is. I don't see how you can disagree, though, that once you have
developed some
identification with some group, negative feelings about outside
groups come to mind much more
easily than, on a strictly reasonable basis, they ought. This has been experimentally confirmed (references from that
link): Divide a group
arbitrarily into Blue Team and Green Team, put them through some team-bonding activities, and see how fast Blues and
Greens end up disliking each
other. With very little effort you can get them to the throat-cutting stage.

This is very plain in the creationism-evolution debates, whose anti-outgroup subtexts are, on the one side:
You are inhuman brutes
determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and
on the other: You are
obscurantist ignoramuses who'd like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and
priests telling us what to
think. Neither subtext has much relation to reality, in my experience — I mean, I know a couple dozen
people on each side of this,
and none fits either description. The scientists are not looking to convert Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason; the
creationists aren't plotting to
burn heretics at the stake.

As someone once said, though, the heart wants what it wants. One thing the human heart wants is an explanation
in terms of human-like agency
for the more mysterious kind of natural phenomenon: the bacterial
flagellum,
the fine structure constant,
consciousness, or, in WFB's case,
Hamlet.
Another is a sense of
place and status in any group the heart's proprietor belongs to, coupled with scathing contempt for those outside the
group.

Religion and politics — still (one hopes) banned in the officers' mess, but unavoidable elsewhere.
It's a pity we're like this, but
we're human and we can't help it. We evolved that way.